The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 11

3. To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men's orchards, and stolen their fruit, when I had enough at home, &c.

There is a childlike simplicity in this account of his sins of his childhood which is very pleasing.

Ib. p. 5, 6.

And the use that G.o.d made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but sc.r.a.ped up as great a treasure of them as I could. * * * It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. * * *

And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way. But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest: and there had my labour and delight.

What a picture of myself!

Ib. p. 22.

In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with such doubts as I was conscious of.

One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight. The root of faith is in the will. Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.

Ib.

The being and attributes of G.o.d were so clear to me, that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all things.

Even so with me;--but, whether G.o.d was existentially as well as essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between the speculative and the moral man.

Ib. p. 23.

Mere Deism, which is the most plausible compet.i.tor with Christianity, is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to G.o.d.

Excellent.

Ib.

All these a.s.sistances were at hand before I came to the immediate evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.

This is as it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality.

Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, 'quanto minus tanto melius'.

Ib. p. 24.

And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of G.o.d.

No wonder;--because the babe would perish without the mother's milk, is it therefore loathsome to the mother? Surely the little ones that Christ embraced had not been baptized. And yet 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven'.

Ib. p. 25.

Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to be willing to. And these said, when you have displeased and provoked him to the utmost, he will be your King still. * * * The more you offend him, the less you can trust him; and when mutual confidence is gone, a war is beginning. * * * And if you conquer him, what the better are you? He will still be King. You can but force him to an agreement; and how quickly will he have power and advantage to violate that which he is forced to, and to be avenged on you all for the displeasure you have done him! He is ignorant of the advantages of a King that cannot foresee this.

This paragraph goes to make out a case in justification of the Regicides which Baxter would have found it difficult to answer. Certainly a more complete exposure of the inconsistency of Baxter's own party cannot be.

For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those cla.s.ses, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been politically inert, with little influence and no actual power,--I mean the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London: while a vast majority of the n.o.bles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the majority in Parliament, went over to the King at once. Add to these the whole systematized force of the High Church Clergy and all the rude ignorant vulgar in high and low life, who detested every attempt at moral reform,--and it is obvious that the King could not want opportunities to retract and undo all that he had conceded under compulsion. But that neither the will was wanting, nor his conscience at all in the way, his own advocate Clarendon and others have supplied d.a.m.ning proofs.

Ib. p. 27.

And though Parliaments may draw up Bills for repealing laws, yet hath the King his negative voice, and without his consent they cannot do it; which though they acknowledge, yet did they too easily admit of pet.i.tions against the Episcopacy and Liturgy, and connived at all the clamors and papers which were against them.

How so? If they admitted the King's right to deny, they must admit the subject's right to entreat.

Ib.

Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing of the dioceses to a narrower compa.s.s, or the setting up of a subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently.

Did Baxter find it so himself--and when too he had the formal and recorded promise of Charles II. for it?

Ib.

But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself in danger, or _their grandeur and riches at least_, most of them turned against the Parliament.

This, and in this place, is unworthy of Baxter. Even he, good man, could not wholly escape the jaundice of party.

Ib. p. 34.

They said to this;--that as all the courts of justice do execute their sentences in the King's name, and this by his own law, and therefore by his authority, so much more might his Parliament do.

A very sound argument is here disguised in a false a.n.a.logy, an inapplicable precedent, and a sophistical form. Courts of justice administer the total of the supreme power retrospectively, involved in the name of the most dignified part. But here a part, as a part, acts as the whole, where the whole is absolutely requisite,--that is, in pa.s.sing laws; and again as B. and C. usurp a power belonging to A. by the determination of A. B. and C. The only valid argument is, that Charles had by acts of his own ceased to be a lawful King.

Ib. p. 40.

And that the authority and person of the King were inviolable, out of the reach of just accusation, judgment, or execution by law; as having no superior, and so no judge.

But according to Grotius, a king waging war against the lawful copartners of the 'summa potestas' ceases to be their king, and if conquered forfeits to them his former share. And surely if Charles had been victor, he would have taken the Parliament's share to himself. If it had been the Parliament, and not a mere faction with the army, that tried and beheaded Charles, I do not see how any one could doubt the lawfulness of the act, except upon very technical grounds.

Ib. p. 41.

For if once legislation, the chief act of government, be denied to any part of government at all, and affirmed to belong to the people as such, who are no governors, all government will hereby be overthrown.

Here Baxter falls short of the subject, and does not see the full consequents of his own prior, most judicious, positions. Legislation in its high and most proper sense belongs to G.o.d only. A people declares that such and such they hold to be laws, that is, G.o.d's will.